The Microsoft Teams Toolkit is now the Microsoft 365 Agents Toolkit

It’s finally happened! The Microsoft Teams Toolkit is now known as the Microsoft 365 Agents Toolkit.

First announced at Build 2020, and with its GA in 2022, the Teams Toolkit (TTK) was released in a world that did not yet know about LLMs, Copilot or agents. Back then, the tool was helpful scaffolding for building the various different Teams apps: messaging extensions, tabs and bots, as well as packaging them up into a Microsoft Teams app. Remember this screen?!

Since then, more and more functionality has been added on, including plenty of workloads that aren’t just about Microsoft Teams. Partly this is because those features have been added to the underlying Microsoft Teams Application construct – such as making apps visible in places other than Teams, like Outlook and office.com.

More recently though, TTK became the place to get great scaffolding for building Declarative Agents for Copilot, and that’s now become the primary focus, in line with the general theme for Microsoft 365 extensibility right now:

However, you can still continue to use the Agents Toolkit (ATK I think we’re using – just don’t say it as “attack”!) to perform the same tasks as before, they’re just a little bit more hidden away:

I think that this renaming is a Good Thing. It better describes what the Toolkit has become, and helps it in what I think is one of its most important functions: disambiguation. There are multiple different ways of building agents right now for Microsoft 365 developers, and I think it’s good to have a common starting place for them all, to help people choose between them. It’s still confusing, but I’m hopeful that the ATK can play a role in helping people make the right choices.

It’s also a good reminder that nothing lasts forever. Who could have imagined, back in 2022, that anything would grow bigger than Teams as a development ecosystem in Microsoft 365?!